The first thing on the schedule this week is to clean my office. Since RTX back in July, I’ve had all the boxes of materials I use at events stacked up several feet deep behind my chair to ths point that I could barely move in here. It seemed easier than playing Sokoban with my limited closet space once to put everything away, once more to get everything back out for Retropalooza, and one final time to put them all away for the year. Now that I’m done with this season of events, I’m putting all that stuff away, and throwing some of it away, as in the case of years-old Super Win flyers that I’ll never use again. My office is still more crowded than I’d like (such is the nature of trying to tackle every aspect of development from a single bedroom), but at least I can reach my bookshelves again.

The plan for October is levels. Over the next four weeks, I’ll be working on new prefab sets based on a few of the tilesets seen in Gunmetal Arcadia Zero, including the city, wilderness, and hive. This will likely involve some additional code support, as these themes may involve some new rules that the catacombs set has not.

The city is up first. This is where each session will start, and necessarily where any training and tutorialization will have to happen. I’m not yet sure how that will work in this game, whether it will be an optional leg of content that can be skipped or replayed as desired (as in Spelunky), or whether the game will look for opportunities to introduce new mechanics dynamically when a fresh save file is started (as in, uh…some popular game that did that). But those are the problems I’ll be solving over the next couple of weeks.